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Recently there are some discussion regarding whether ESP8266 I/Os are 5V tolerant. The most active one being the article on Hackaday. The same article was shared on ESP8266 Facebook group and Espressif CEO Mr Teo Swee Ann commented that “i can reply officially here: it is 5V tolerant at the IO. while the supply voltage is at 3.3V.”

So I am one of the 200 lucky bastards who receive the Espressif ESP32 beta units. It arrives in a nicely printed packaging which resembles very much like a jewel box. And the item inside is really a piece of jewelry.

In the recent Maker Faire I demonstrated an ESP8266 MQTT VFD clock. Some readers had wrote to ask for the soure code. Because the project was builtup within only 2 days, the actual source code is more or less of spaghette type. However the underlying MQTT client may be useful to someone who likes the RTOS SDK.

Another year, another Maker Faire. Yes! for this year it is nolonger “Mini Maker Faire”, we’ve just upgraded to the full fledged “Maker Faire” event. As Singapore Maker Faire has grown 10 times compare to 3 year ago, I am not able to cover every single booth or exhibit in the event. I only write about those I’m interested in. Continue reading →

Since I wrote the STM32CubeMX to Makefile converter, a lot of people have been helping to improve the project. Thanks! Meanwhile I also heard a lot of complaints about the quality of STM32Cube codes, for example, the thread here. Although I believe STM32Cube’s quality will eventually improve, at the moment there are still applications for the good old “Standard Peripheral Library” and other ST middlewares. Therefore I wrote another program, that converts most of ST’s example project into Makefile project. Continue reading →

Writing peripheral initialization code is probably the most tedious work in embedded development. It always successfully stops me from starting a new project. I believe engineers at STMicroelectronics share the same pain. Therefore they created STM32Cube firmware and STM32CubeMX graphical configuration tool, which turns numerous key strokes and page flips into just a few mouse clicks. STM32CubeMX is free software, but the initialization code it generates require compiler tools carrying hefty price tags, IARARM, Keil ARM-MDK, and Atollic TrueSTUDIO, to name the few. Fair enough these compilers do offer free editions with limited functionality. But I still prefer unrestricted, free tool that is easily scale-able for my current and future projects. Just like the GNU Make and ARM GCC toolchain I described in Opensource STM32 development.

The rise of the ESP8266 WiFi chip was almost overnight with Espressif’s open approach and pushing from Hackaday. While no ground-breaking product has yet emerged, the development on the chip are phenomenon. However due to an unknown reason the ESP8266 modules manufacture seems to prefer non-standard 2.0mm pitch connector, which gives a lot of headache to breadboarding lovers like me. This forced me to make a breadboard friendly ESP8266 breakout board.

During last year’s blackfriday sale I was introduced to the epic Lightblue Bean “Cheaper than a turkey” promotion. I grabbed two beans during a group buy spree. A week later’s The AmpHour interview with Colin Karpfinger justifies that my purchase is not purely impulsive. However I did make a mistake. I was under the impression that a Mac computer is sufficient to program the bean, but actually only recently Macs are supported, whereas my “Late 2010” Macbook Air is on the exclusion list due to the lack of Bluetooth 4.0 / Low Energy profile.